Pragmatism and new directions for american philosophy: a turn to the future via commitment to scientific method

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Pragmatism and new directions for american philosophy: a turn to the future via commitment to scientific method

David Sidorskyn - Emeritus Professor of Philosophy. Columbia University.

The three founding fathers of pragmatism - Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey - heralded pragmatism as a movement that turned philosophy toward the future. From their perspective, pragmatic philosophy contrasted with traditional metaphysics that they interpreted as an attempt to discover the necessary presuppositions for the existence of a phenomenal world. Some pragmatists analyzed the quest for necessary presuppositions as a turn toward the past. Pragmatic philosophy also rejected a Humean or empiricist metaphysics according to which impressions or sense data were representative of an underlying reality. The Humean account, in which there was no future confirmation of the data of experience, was considered by some pragmatist as a turn towards the present. The initiating turn towards the future within pragmatism was taken by Charles Pierce who defined the “real” as referring to what would be said to exist as a result of the convergence of a process of scientific inquiry towards the asymptotic limit of the inquiry. Thus, what was said to exist required confirmation by future experience.James accepted a Piercian account of the true as fixed by a convergence of beliefs through a process of confirmation of the consequences of these beliefs over the long, long run. For Dewey, the acceptance of Pierce's turn to the future led to the adoption of scientific method as an instrument for human prediction, control, and even future transformation of the environment. Deweyan pragmatism expanded the application of scientific method to problems of society and culture with a vision of corrigible and progressive reconstruction of American institutions.

Keywords: pragmatism, scientific method, community of inquiry, future experience, reconstruction, moral progress, pluralism, democracy, economic planning, liberalism

Прагматизм и новые направления для развития американской философии: обращение к будущему через приверженность научному методу

Колумбийский университет. Columbia University.

С точки зрения отцов-основателей прагматизма - Ч. Пирса, У Джеймса и Дж. Дьюи - это направление обращало философию к будущему. По их мнению, философия прагматизма отличалась от традиционной метафизики, которую они считали попыткой обнаружить необходимые допущения, лежащие в основании существования феноменального мира. Некоторые прагматисты рассматривали поиск таких необходимых допущений как обращение к прошлому. Прагматическая философия также отрицала и эмпиристскую, или юмианскую, метафизику, согласно которой впечатления или данные чувств были представителями порождающей их реальности. Позиция Юма, согласно которой данные чувственного опыта не могли получить подтверждения в будущем, воспринималась некоторыми прагматистами как обращение к настоящему. В рамках прагматизма исходный импульс обращения к будущему был дан Чарльзом Пирсом, который определил термин «реальное» как указывающий на то, что будет признано существующим в тот момент, когда процесс научного исследования достигнет асимптотического предела этого исследования. Таким образом, признание чего-либо существующим требовало подтверждения будущим опытом. Джеймс принял воззрения Пирса на истинное как то, что фиксируется конвергенцией верований, возникающей в процессе подтверждения последствий этих верований в долгосрочной перспективе. Для Дьюи принятие провозглашенного Пирсом обращения к будущему привело и к принятию научного метода как инструмента для осуществления предсказаний, управления и даже будущей трансформации окружающей среды. В прагматизме Дьюи сфера приложения научного метода была расширена и включила в себя проблемы общества и культуры. Он предполагал, что научный метод поможет осуществить поэтапную и прогрессивную реконструкцию американских институтов.

Ключевые слова: прагматизм, научный метод, исследовательское сообщество, будущий опыт, реконструкция, прогресс в морали, плюрализм, демократия, экономическое планирование, либерализм

The development of pragmatism from its opening phases in the writings of each of its three founding fathers, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey marked a new direction for American philosophy. For each of these three founding fathers of pragmatism, this new direction involved a turn toward an emphasis on future experience, via its commitment to scientific method as the primary instrument for human knowledge. This turn to the future was distinct from a philosophical emphasis on foundational presuppositions of experience, which was considered to be a turn toward the past, or a philosophical emphasis on current sensations or “impressions” as representations of underlying reality, which was considered to be a turn to the present without any sign toward the future.

In two early essays of Charles Peirce that heralded the beginning of Pragmatism - “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” and “The Fixation of Belief” - the connection between the turn toward the future and the commitment to scientific method within pragmatic philosophy was initiated. This connection can be traced from Peirce's definition of the truth as based upon the future convergence of hypotheses by a process of experimental verification, through William James's emphasis on Pragmatism as a method of mediating between beliefs through an appeal to their future consequences, to Dewey's emphasis on knowledge as an instrument of prediction and control of future experience of the human environment. This theme within Pragmatism as a shift of philosophy to the future was also emphasized in different ways by later generations, including Sidney Hook among Dewey's first generation of students, and Richard Rorty, among later proponents of pragmatism.

One starting point for a survey of the turn toward the future within Pragmatic philosophy can be found, as noted above, in Charles Peirce's essay “The Fixation of Belief.”

In that essay, Peirce distinguishes between the three methods of tenacity, intuition, or consensus and the method of scientific inquiry as ways of fixing belief (CP 5.377-387). These references cite the volume and paragraph numbers in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, 1931-1958. Peirce's argument is that, unlike the methods of tenacity, intuition or consensus, which relate to the assertion of past or present beliefs, scientific method requires a community of inquiry that generates hypotheses with predictive consequences that are confirmed or refuted by future events and experiences. Peirce defends his own preference for scientific method by demonstrating that scientific method provides the best analysis of “truth” in its account of the convergence of a community of inquiry upon those hypotheses that have received confirmation of their experimentally predictable consequences. The turn to the future is emphasized in such a theory of scientific knowledge since this process of convergence by a succession of hypotheses, each of which is fallible, corrigible and progressive, is to be carried out toward an asymptotic limit. Even greater significance is ascribed to this turn toward the future, since the “real” is defined by Peirce as those entities that will be said to exist in the true statements that will be established by the process of scientific method in its future arrival at its asymptotic limit (CP 5.311; 5.316; 5.356). This identification of reality with scientific knowledge was taken as an indication of the elimination of metaphysics within Pragmatism. Such an elimination of metaphysics identified a bridge between the views of Logical Positivism and Pragmatism, which was emphasized when many members of the Logical Positivist movements were forced to immigrate to the United States and took up positions at American universities in the 1930s. On the other hand, the differences between the activist tendencies of American Pragmatism in its efforts at societal and cultural reconstruction as contrasted with the emphasis on linguistic analysis with its limitation of philosophi - cal involvement in political activism remained.

William James accepted Peirce's shift to the future through the commitment to scientific method. In the series of lectures that made up James' volume titled “Pragmatism,” James indicated that Pragmatism could mediate between competing philosophical hypotheses by an appeal to their future consequences. See James, W. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York, 1907, p. 18. James's defense of Pragmatism was supported, in an independent fashion, by several Italian philosophers, most notably Giovanni Papini in the circle that published a journal on Italian Modernism called Leonardo. Papini invented the title of Futurism for James's version of Pragmatism. Papini transmitted the term “Futurism” for identification of an Italian school of artists, whose theme was directed toward the representation of the technological future of the natural and human environment. James did not, however, involve himself in a careful explication of Peircean statements regarding the “true” and the “real.” James's affirmation of Pierce's turn to the future involved a further shift in idiom as in his identification of the “true” as that which would be useful to believe over the long, long run.

There were recognized problems among Pragmatists with both the theories of Peirce and the theories of James. In the case of Peirce, as Israel Scheffler was to point out in his book, Four Pragmatists, the existence of an asymptotic limit to a process of convergence, as proposed in Peirce's definition of truth, requires a proof for the existence of a limit as distinct from recognition of an ongoing process of conver - gence by a community of inquiry. See Scheffler, I. Four Pragmatists: A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey. London, 1986, p. 65 ff. In the case of James, the identification of the “true” with the useful appeared to introduce potential relativism of truth. The argument contra James was formulated through the criticism that James had replaced Peirce's grounds for accepting a belief through the criterion of confirmation by its experimental consequences with the thesis that a person could adopt a belief or an hypothesis if it “worked,” thereby introducing the ambiguous formulation that a person could adopt a belief or hypothesis if its psychological and social consequences were advantageous for the believer over the long, long run.

William James' lectures on Pragmatism, including his popular phrase that defined the truth in terms of that which works in the future, had an impact beyond narrow philosophical circles in American culture. Santayana wrote of James “his scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world.” Santayana, G. “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings. Bloomington, 2009, p. 353. One piquant illustration of this is shown in a comment by a major journalist of the group that was identified as the “muck-rakers” within American society, Lincoln Steffens. Upon his conversion to faith in the Soviet system after his return from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, Steffens celebratedly and notoriously declared: “I have seen the future and it works.” Hartshorn, P. I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens. Berkeley, CA, 2011, p. 315.